Battle of the cheapest internet plan - Converge ICT Fiber vs Globe DSL

I recently subscribed to Converge ICT FiberX plan and friends were asking how it was, how's the ping, how fast was it when browsing sites hosted in Asia, Europe, Americas etc and how it compared to my existing Globe DSL plan.

So I hooked up my laptop to a LAN cable, connected it directly to the router and did a speedtest

One for Converge ICT Fiber (P1500/month plan - 25Mbps download, 25Mbps upload, no data cap)

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Another for Globe DSL (P1299/month plan - 10Mbps download, 1Mbps upload, 100GB cap per month)

Converge attained about 96% of the advertised download speed, Globe DSL, on the other hand, was a looong way off.

BUT...

This test won't suffice, it's highly possible that the speed is achieved only on the last mile connection - between my home up to the nearest speedtest server, in my case just a few kilometers away.

Will that speed be attained when the servers are farther away like on the other side of the planet?

To test this, I used iperf3, it's a tool for measuring the maximum achievable bandwidth between two hosts (read more about it here). I installed it on my laptop, it'll be the client and installed it also on several servers.

This command was executed on each server, -s means server mode.

$ iperf3 -s

I wanted the complete picture so for good measure, I ran many servers in multiple locations on two of the most popular hosting companies, AWS and Digital Ocean.

14 servers in AWS, one per Amazon AWS Region

And 8 servers in DigitalOcean, one per DigitalOcean data center

That should pretty much cover most of the planet, especially since most sites today are hosted in AWS.

Ran these on my laptop, one for each server sequentially

$ ping -c 5 <Server IP address>

$ iperf3 -c <Server IP address> --omit 10 -t 30

$ iperf3 -c <Server IP address> --omit 10 -t 30 -R

-c means client mode, client sends and the server will receive

--omit 10 means that it should ignore the first 10 seconds of measurements, this is to get around the effects of TCP slow start

-t 30 means the test should run for 30 seconds
-R means reverse test, sender will send and client will receive

The first iperf3 command is an upload test, it sends data from the laptop to the servers in AWS and DigitalOcean.
The second is a download test, AWS and DigitalOcean will send data to the laptop.

Here's a sample result for AWS

And the tallied results

Note: Measurements taken in the morning of June 26, 2017

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Converge ICT Fiber

192 ms average ping

23.73 Mbps average download

12.04 Mbps average  upload

Globe DSL

228 ms average ping

2.65 Mbps average download

0.76 Mbps average upload

Converge wins hands down! Don't even bother with Globe DSL, better to just add 200 pesos to get yourself a high speed internet with no volume cap so you can download and watch everything you want.